Cons

A little heavy and bulky

Design might not be to everyone’s taste

Bottom Line

The Mag Grip is a bit bulky, and it works best with a 20700 or 21700 battery, but it performs as well as the best mods on the market and looks pretty cool. As long as you’re happy with the 100 W limit, it’s a fantastic deal for $69.99.

Smok Mag Grip Review

Smok has really been knocking it out of the park over the last few years in particular. With excellent mod after excellent mod hitting the market, alongside an increasingly-impressive selection of tanks, the manufacturer is easily one of the biggest names in the industry. The Mag Grip is a new member of the Mag family of mods, and it has the same gun-grip like design that immediately makes it stand out from the crowd. With a 21700 or a 20700 battery, it puts out up to 100 W, and it comes in a kit with the TFV8 Baby V2 tank. It might sound good, but the real question is whether it lives up to its potential and whether it’s worth the $69.99 price tag. We’ve tested the device out for our Smok Mag Grip review to find out.

What You Get

The Mag Grip kit comes in a standard-style Smok box, with a sleeve for the device surrounding a generic black, Smok-branded box, with your kit occupying two layers on the inside. The top layer holds the mod itself, with the tank, two coils (an S1 pre-installed and an S2, both 0.15 ohms), a charging cable, a spare glass section for the tank, spare O-rings and a manual on the level underneath. The battery section of the mod also has a sleeve inside so you can use it with an 18650 battery if you prefer. Overall this is a great selection and gives you everything you need to start vaping apart from e-juice.

Smok Mag Grip Review – The Design

Appearance

The Mag Grip looks like the handle of a gun, complete with a trigger-like fire button on what would be the front-facing side. The bulk of the body is colored, depending on which option you chose when ordering – out of red, blue, chrome and black – and the front edge is black for most of the options or red for the black version. The chrome version really accentuates the gun-like appearance of the device and gives the whole thing a very futuristic vibe. The body is ergonomically designed, too, with a groove for your thumb to sit and a curved section around the trigger button for your index finger to curve around. The screen occupies the top edge, facing you as you hold the device and look down towards it.

Overall it looks really cool, and although the gun grip element might not be to everybody’s taste, it does offer a comfortable fit in your hand when you’re vaping.

Display Screen

The display screen on the Mag Grip is quite small, as far as modern devices go, but it conveys everything you need to know and is more than big enough to work with the menu system. The home screen has your main setting (wattage in VW mode and temperature in TC mode) taking up the majority of the screen, with a symbol for the hit strength (e.g. “N” for normal or “H” for hard) and one for the current mode and a battery life indicator to its right. Underneath, the Mag Grip displays the resistance of your coil and the voltage the device is firing at, then there is a bar at the very bottom to time your puffs.

Overall the OLED display is definitely small, but it makes great use of the space it has.

Battery Compartment

The battery compartment on the Mag Grip is one of the most unique and arguably cringeworthy thing about it. There is a circular button beside the firing trigger, and you press this in to get access to the battery. The battery is held inside a tube in the body of the mod, and this slides out of the bottom of the device – like the magazine of a gun – when you press the button. On the plus side, this is a smooth process and it’s really easy to get access to the battery. On the (potential) negative side it takes the “gun-like” look much further, and it just comes across as a little dorky in its similarity to reloading a gun. I say “potential” negative because admittedly this is personal preference – it certainly works efficiently and you could well think it’s cool.

Everything is clearly labeled on tube, though, with a “+” at the top and a “–” at the bottom so you can’t really go wrong when it comes to battery orientation. And the sleeve for using the device with an 18650 battery instead of a larger one just drops right into this, so it’s pretty easy to use too.

The Firing Trigger

The trigger-style fire button is another gun-style element of the design, but this is really well-executed and works excellently when you’re vaping. The ergonomic design means your finger falls on it naturally when holding the device, and the concave curve on the button makes it really easy to push in. It gives a satisfying click when you push it too.

The 510 Connection

The Mag Grip has the industry-standard 510 connection point, so you can use pretty much any tank on the market with the mod. The contact point is gold-plated and spring loaded, so you’ll have excellent connectivity regardless of the tank you use.

The TFV8 Baby V2 Tank

The included TFV8 Baby V2 tank is also really well-designed. With a slight bulge in the central glass section to accommodate 5 ml of e-liquid, a swing-open top-filling design and a wide bore Delrin drip tip, it’s similar enough in design to most tanks on the market but achieves everything it needs to in style. The tank unscrews to give you access to the coils, with the S1 using mesh and the S2 being a quad-coil variety, and they just screw in and out of the base of the tank. There are also three adjustable airflow slots around the base of the tank so you can adjust the draw to suit your preferences.

Overall

The Mag Grip has a unique design, and even though it’s unlikely to be to everyone’s taste, it looks quite good overall and more importantly, it’s clearly put together with ease of use and comfort in mind.

Smok Mag Grip Review – Features

Variable Wattage up to 100 W

The ability to set the wattage you want to vape at is expected from essentially any mod on the market today, and the Mag Grip doesn’t disappoint in this area with its maximum setting of 100 W. This only applies when you’re using a 20700 or 21700 battery, reducing to 85 W if you’re using an 18650 cell, but both limits shouldn’t be an issue for the majority of vapers. The two adjustment buttons beside the OLED display are used to change the main setting, and it moves in increments of 0.1 W unless you hold the button down, in which case it speeds up and moves in 1 W increments. The minimum resistance in VW mode is 0.1 ohms.

Temperature Control Functionality

The Mag Grip also features temperature control (TC) vaping with nickel, titanium and stainless steel coils. It works with the standard range of temperatures: between 100 and 315 °C or 200 and 600 °F, and supports any coil of 0.05 ohms up to 2 ohms. When you select TC mode, you choose the wire type you’ll be vaping with, and then you get the option of making adjustments to the TCR value so it can suit your preferences. You also get the chance to freely adjust the ramp-up wattage after making your choice, so you can have a harder or softer hit to suit your preferences.

Menu System

The menu system on the Smok Mag works like most Smok menus: three clicks of the fire button takes you into it, and you can use the adjustment buttons or quick clicks of the fire button to cycle through the options. There are only four main menu options: Mode (for switching between VW and TC modes), Puff (to see the puff count, set a maximum number of puffs or reset the counter), Power (to switch the device on or off) and Settings (to change things like how long the screen stays on when it isn’t in use, the contrast of the screen or to update the firmware). Holding down the fire button accepts your current selection and takes you to the next menu, or back to the home-screen after making adjustments. Overall it works pretty well and it’s trimmed-down enough that you can find your way around it easily enough.

Hit Strength

The Mag Grip also has the option of adjustable hit strength, which basically either increases or decreases the wattage right at the start of your puff before reverting to your setting. You can change this to Soft, Hard or Normal, with soft reducing the initial wattage and hard increasing it. This is a nice little touch for anyone who likes a punchy start to their draw in particular.

Safety Features

The Mag Grip has the expected range of safety features, including a 10 second cutoff to prevent accidental activation, over-heating protection, low battery protection and short circuit prevention. This is really all you need to stay safe when vaping, and even though it’s unlikely you’ll need the protections, it’s good they’re there.

Smok Mag Grip Review – In Use

Performance – VW Mode

The Mag Grip works just as you’d want it to in VW mode. It responds quickly and the hit strength options mean you can easily tailor the draw to suit your preferences. Combined with the TFV8 Baby V2 – especially the mesh coil, but both are great – the vapor production and flavor are hard to beat. It works just as well at high settings and low ones, and the high power output is great if you’re big on clouds.

Performance – TC Mode

The Mag Grip’s TC mode is also great. The adjustable ramp-up wattage is central to this, because at full power you’d hit your chosen temperature pretty quickly and the drop-off in power would be more noticeable. When I had it set up to 60 W ramp-up and 420 °F, it reached temperature fairly quickly and stayed there with impressive accuracy, only dropping a few degrees for a split-second before increasing to the limit again. The draw is consistent and you don’t notice the fluctuations in power as you hit the limit. Overall, the TC mode works really well, and you can always adjust the TCR if it doesn’t work like you want anyway.

Ease of Use

The mod is pretty easy to get to grips with if you’ve used anything similar before. Menu systems are often a little clunky, and while I do still avoid using the Mag Grip’s menu for this reason – the hold-to-advance part in particular is less than intuitive – it isn’t much of a headache when you need to change anything. There are also shortcuts for the most common actions you’ll need to perform: press the fire button and the left adjustment button to change modes, and the fire button with the right adjustment button to change the hit strength. Overall it’s easy enough to use even if you’re new to vaping, but more experienced vapers won’t have an issue at all.

Comfort and Portability

The Mag Grip’s design makes it super comfortable to hold. The shape makes it a perfect fit in your hand, with the thumb groove in particular making it really easy to hold onto and vape with. The device is a little chunky, but it will still fit in a reasonable-size pocket (anything better than a tight pair of jeans is enough) and can slip into a bag pretty easily. It is quite heavy, especially for a single-battery mod, but it doesn’t really cause any issues in day to day use.

Build Quality

The Mag Grip is really well put together. The bulkiness combined with the carefully-machined shape and the snug fit of the battery insert makes it feel pretty much indestructible – if I knocked it into a table I’d be more worried about the table than the mod. On top of this, the buttons offer just the right amount of resistance but still click in easily, and the threading is well-made so you can always connect your tank without cross-threading or other issues. Overall, the manufacturing quality is hard to fault.

Editor Rating

Design4/5

Build Quality5/5

Perfomance5/5

Functionality4/5

Overall4.5/5

Is it Worth Picking Up?

The Mag Grip is a well-made, feature-packed and hard-hitting mod. While the design might not be for everyone, and the device is a bit heavy and could do better in terms of portability, if you’re looking for a serious, high-end mod it’s a great offering. The price of $69.99 for the mod and tank makes it a good deal, and although there are cheaper mods on the market, when you take the quality into account it’s comfortably up there with some of the best deals in the industry. If you decide to pick it up, you won’t be disappointed.